The former NAACP leader of the Spokane, Washington chapter, releases her memoir, In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, this month. In it, she details her journey to “freeing” her “inner blackness,” according to New York Daily News.

“I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth… and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs,” she writes in an excerpt shared by Daily Mail.

“I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo. Imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways… that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in.”

Chapter titles include “Escaping to Africa (in My Head)” and “Hustling to Make a Dollar,” in which the 40-year-old likens her childhood chores to slavery.